Ever Changing, Ever the Same

Henry David Thoreau wrote, in Walden, "The mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation."

Politicians come and go, movements come and go, the
social contract is altered by each new generation. And,
through all these changes, Thoreau's observation remains
prescient. He saw this as an unconscious part of the
nature of human beings. Thoreau's words echo those of
Socrates in this translation, "The unexamined life is not
worth living for a human being."

Our primate nature mostly does not drive us to examine
our relationship with reality. We are, though, driven
to understand the rules and roles of our culture and
subculture to the extent necessary to provide for
adequate personal security and finding a mate. But that
does leave us, as a population, struggling with our
perceptions of what is wrong with the way things are at
any given moment. At each moment, we are convinced that
it is not suppose to be this way or that it is suppose
to be some other way and, most importantly, we beleive
that we are helpless to change it. That sense of
helplessness in the face of what we perceive as obvious
inequities, expresses itself as resignation and
cynicism. We are left as a species desperately living
unexamined lives, taking our cultural truths at face
value even when discordant.

Meanings. Nothing More Than Meanings

We are creatures of habit. Our behaviors and beliefs
are reinforced and become the truth about the way things
are and the way things are not. To some degree or
another, we are each living in a personal reality that
does not accurately reflect the physical reality of our
world. The value of examining one's life is to discover
the personal truths that only serve to suppress one's
natural expression. Discovering and discarding our
habits of thinking about who we are and who other people
are with the sole purpose of setting ourselves free ends
the desperation and provides the path to a life worth
living.

Examining one's life is not a search for the truth about
life or ourselves. One of the first areas to examine is
one's relationship with truth followed by our moral
codes. Giving up the cherished belief that things are
right or wrong, or good or bad provides a doorway into
the world of what is possible for us individually and
within our groups and communities.

During the process of examining one's habitual ways of
thinking about the world, it may become clear that
everything we think is true about morality and social
conduct is simply a human creation and contains no more
truth than any fairytale woven by children. We have
simply forgotten that we made it up. And, interestingly,
we made it up before we reached maturity. We live lives
of quiet desperation because we created the world as a
desperate place when we were four or fourteen. Clearly,
though, for most of us, our anxieties have been with us
all of our adult life. We just have better
interpretations and reasons.

Examining one's life is a courageous act. We give up
cherished beliefs with no guarantee that reality
provides something better and a great deal of worry that
it will provide something far worse. But living with
the devil you know is still living with the devil.
There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.